Tasha Alexander - Dangerous to Know

“Does your ego know no bounds?” I asked.

“I certainly hope not,” Cécile said. “That would be a grand disappointment.”

“I shall call him Arsène Lupin,” Monsieur Leblanc said. “And I will, perhaps, let it be known—or at least rumored—that he’s not altogether an invention.”

“I shall come to you at Étretat twice a year and update you on my exploits,” Sebastian said. “And I may even adopt the name Vasseur as a nom de plume, seeing as how it goes with eyes of a certain shade of blue. Might be useful if people thought I’d been in the Foreign Legion.”

“Capet!” Colin’s eyes gave a stern warning, then he looked away, his attention diverted by a bright flutter at the garden gate.

“We set off the moment we got your telegram,” Madame Prier said, Toinette trailing behind her in a yellow dress. “You have saved us all from the distress of never having justice done for our dearest girl!” She pulled me out of my chair and embraced me, not balking at my expression of disbelief. Toinette, however, was not yet so practiced in the art of selective notice.

“She doesn’t believe you for an instant, Maman ,” she said, and took the seat closest to Colin, who immediately rose and crossed to me, standing behind my chair and putting a hand on my shoulder.

“You should treat your mother with more respect, Toinette,” he said. “Impertinence is not an attractive trait in a young lady. Not, that is, when it is full of malice.”

Toinette opened her mouth and closed it again without speaking. Her mother lowered herself onto a chair and accepted a cup of tea from Cécile.

“My husband apologizes for not coming with us,” Madame Prier said. “He is much engaged in business at the moment. But his relief at what you have done is palpable.”

Toinette snorted.

We all ignored her.

“Have you learned anything else from that horrible man?” Madame Prier asked. “I can’t believe I received him at my house. It makes me want to move. I can hardly bear to go into the sitting room anymore.”

“He admitted to having stolen the page from Laurent’s notebook after he found it in Edith’s room at the asylum during one of his visits to her,” Colin said. “He was already planning to kidnap your daughter, and considered Laurent’s words a sort of insurance should anything go wrong. Planted correctly, he thought it would implicate Laurent in his sister’s disappearance.”

“Despicable beast,” she said. “And he was calling himself Myriel?”

“Yes,” I said. “And disguised himself with a moustache and spectacles. Told her he’d been paying for Lucy’s care.”

“I always knew one couldn’t trust any member of the Foreign Legion. Mercenaries, all of them,” Madame Prier said.

“Did it ever occur to you, Maman , that had you actually visited Edith instead of pretending to she might not have accepted Myriel’s false friendship?” Toinette asked. “And hence you might have averted this entire situation?”

“There’s no point thinking that way,” I said. “George was fixed on his purpose. He would have got to Edith one way or another. No one could have prevented it.” I didn’t entirely believe my words, but saying them seemed the right thing to do.

Madame Prier leaned forward. “May we see Lucy now?”

My heart clenched. I hated the thought of the little girl in the hands of the Priers, even if they were her closest relatives. “She’s resting now,” I said. “But you’ll meet her soon.”

Toinette rolled her eyes. “And that will be a delight, I’m sure.”

Cécile cleared her throat, no more eager to see Lucy handed over to her grandmother than I. “I haven’t figured out all the details of this horrendous crime. Why did George take Edith away from Étretat?”

“He knew all along it wouldn’t be practical to stay there indefinitely, but it made for an excellent starting point—a perfect place to hide where there was no connection to him. He’d used Vasseur’s name to take the house, so if Edith ever were traced there, everyone would believe she’d gone with her lover.”

“As soon as her illness grew worse, he sedated her,” Colin said. “He told Lucy her mother was ill, and that he was taking her to hospital. Instead, they went to the château, where he’d set up a makeshift laboratory—”

“With which Emily is all too familiar,” Cécile said.

“Quite,” Colin continued. “He stashed Lucy away in a hidden room in the dovecote—one connected by secret passageway to his laboratory—and started to work on her mother. He was convinced it would lead him to a way to help his wife—something that until that point had seemed to him utterly hopeless.”

Already, Gaudet had found two physicians with whom George had consulted, asking them to do more aggressive electrical treatment on Madeline than either of them thought responsible. There hadn’t been enough research, they said, so he pursued it on his own, even building his own machine. And in the months that followed, he tortured Edith with his experimental treatment, until the fatal day when he turned the current too high.

“Why did he kill Dr. Girard?” Monsieur Leblanc asked, looking up from the notebook into which he had furiously been scribbling notes. “First, he was afraid Girard might recognize him as Myriel. Second, because he got nervous, and thought—erroneously—that another death so far removed from his life with Madeline would protect him from being considered a possible suspect,” Colin said. “He still had the page from the diary, and knew that we were suspicious of Laurent.”

“A dreadful business, all of it,” Cécile said. “Thank goodness it’s over.”

“All that concerns Markham,” Colin said, turning to Sebastian. “There is one further thing to consider: the matter of the stolen Monet. I know you, Capet, swear you had nothing to do with it.”

“I promised the artist himself I would never touch another of his paintings!” Sebastian said.

“Let me see…” I closed my eyes as if deep in thought. “You might not have actually touched the painting, correct? You could have used gloves, had an accomplice lift it for you. Or perhaps you get around your promise by claiming that you have not, in fact, touched another painting. You’ve merely re-stolen what you’d already taken once.”

“You wound me, Kallista,” Sebastian said, rising from the table and leaning against a nearby tree. “How could you think so ill of me?”

“All this crime!” Madame Prier said, fanning herself. “It’s beyond anything a decent person could tolerate.”

“Let’s hope we’ve reached the end of it,” I said. “As for the painting, I shall never change my mind about what happened to it.”

“I suppose it couldn’t have been Monet who took it,” Cécile said. “Although I half wish is was. It would make for a good story, an artist stealing his own work, don’t you think? Perhaps you should write it, Monsieur Leblanc.”

“An interesting suggestion,” Monsieur Leblanc said. “But somehow I don’t think Monet has much of the criminal element in him.”

“Fictionalize it, dear man!” Cécile cried. “Replace him with Manet if you must.”

All save Toinette laughed. She, instead, practiced what I could only imagine was an expression she thought made her appear particularly fetching: lips in a half-open pout, eyes wide. She looked as if she was about to speak and, I assumed, change the subject.

I wasn’t about to let her. Not when I had the opportunity to coax a confession from Sebastian, whom, there could be no doubt, was one hundred percent culpable for the missing Monet.

“Mr. Capet—” I began but stopped as I turned to the tree against which he had only just been leaning. Now he was nowhere in sight. I met Colin’s eyes and he leapt up at once, with me following as close behind as my impractical shoes (silk, lovely, heel far too high for running) would allow. He sprinted away from the others towards a forested section of the garden.